Show HN: SlowTube – Learn songs by ear by slowing them down | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SlowTube – Learn songs by ear by slowing them down

dkthehuman.com

143 pointsnamuorg45 comments

BTW, slowing down idm and similar busy electronic music, in the manner of vinyl, is quite solid entertainment. Aphex Twin is known for this, so much so that RDJ admitted he knows about this and suggested that ‘RDJ Album’ could be listened at 33 RPM to obtain an album of ‘standard’ 45 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWqf17mUyoQ

You need to take care to properly slow down the audio, though, with corresponding pitch shift down. Not ‘stretching’ it keeping the pitch constant.

Apparently the genre of New Beat stemmed in large part from DJs playing rave records at wrong tempos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yBvP3616Wc (see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XUipCxjmmw).

I've also had similarly splendid results with slowing down hard house (specifically my favorite compilation Insomnia Vol.2 from Tidy Trax). It turned into proper house with lotsa relaxed steady drive but much more engaging sound.

On your own machine, both workstation and telephone, VLC can alter the playing speed with good quality and proper pitch shift (or with no shift!). For batch converting, `sox` is a good choice—ffmpeg botches the sound for some reason.

Newpipe (very good alternative YouTube app on android) also supports independently changing speed/pitch. (The button to unlink both is a bit hidden: press the "1x" control when playing a video, then scroll down in the modal that pops up)

I too love slowed songs, and slowing down songs myself.

Also, would recommend DJ Screw as a classic entrypoint into the closely related and timehonoured rap tradition of chopped and screwed songs.[1]

There are also quite a few people on YouTube who do solid slowed versions of... a lot of different genres. Some of their versions I like better than the originals. Some channels keep getting copyright-struck though. I'll edit some links into this comment when I'm not at work,if any of those are still up.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y4qntzxdoF0

DJ Screw wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw

Other slow music worth checking out, in some other genres:

Jolene by Dolly Parton slowed down to 33rpm:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=doz1QJ7LwjA

And some slow covers:

Vanilla Fudge (they do a few like this): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6CL8ASLVWPk

Issac Hayes 18bmin cover of By The Time I get to Pheonix: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Kb607VNKM

Dick Slessig Combo doing a 42 minute version of Wichita Lineman: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MorgJwbBhe4

Ah! Vanilla Fudge reminded me of the extremely fine thing that is songs of Alvin and chipmunks, slowed down 2x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-MYe0SL9Q and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpofYybjXgQ (these are probably compilations from other vids).

They're much much better with bass boosted somewhat with a browser EQ plugin, or with VLC—but the higher end must be kept, for the voices.

The original ‘Diamond Dolls’ is gorgeous in this rendition, and some others like ‘My Sharona,’ ‘Good Girls Don't,’ or ‘How Do I Make You,’ might be the best ways to play such songs.

After those vids, I had to go through their song collections—and found some other gems, like ‘I Fought The Law,’ ‘Blitzkrieg Bop,’ ‘Whip It,’ the incredibly cool ‘I'm Too Sexy,’ or also original ‘I Wish I Could Speak French.’

This is cool. But the name is a bit misleading. I have the same 0.25x - 2x speed range on Youtube anyhow. What it adds is the looping capability. So this is rather LoopTube then SlowTube.

By the way: It would be nice if something like this would be available with better sound quality for slow speeds. I am now half way through listening to this at 0.25:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjjfSESoC4s

With better sound quality this would be pretty epic ...

The looping feature is a nice addition

Imo, not everyone knows they can slow things down on youtube, and "slowtube" transmit the idea they're trying to build much better than "looptube" despite it being slightly inaccurate.

In my experience VLC is pretty good at slowing sound down. It can also play videos straight from Youtube.

Trying it now. At 0.3x it also has these weird ripples in the sound as if it just loops very short sequences.

There must be a better way!

> With better sound quality this would be pretty epic ...

Yeah I was hoping it had some kind of aesthetically advanced interpolation on the audio.

You can loop on YouTube, at least in the browser. Just right click on the player and select "Loop".

You can loop the entire video, not sections of it

I built a similar web thing a while back, except it allowed real-time arbitrary slowing down, and at high quality. The issue was that it was a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, given that it ripped the audio from youtube. It works well and is all web based, but I'm too scared to release it to beyond just my friends and myself.

The options that won't make lawyers get involved are limited, which is possibly why op did it this way.

Why not just make it into a chrome plugin then?

Because many people don't use chrome.

Reminds me of a simplified Soundslice[1]. I believe soundslice was started by Adrian Holovaty, one of the originators of the Django web framework.

For what it is worth, learning by ear is a fantastic way to improve skill as a musician. Slowing down songs is a great way to assist learning by ear.

1. https://www.soundslice.com/

Your belief is correct. :-) Greetings from Adrian.

Yeah, we started Soundslice as a way to sync guitar tablature with YouTube videos, and it included a very nice UI for making precise loops (by dragging across a timeline). That was launched in 2012, but in 2014 we changed our product considerably, leading to the product we have today.

As an aside - I've been following you on youtube since long before 2012. I think I found you looking for Django Reinhardt videos and I was surprised when I realized you were also associated with the Django web framework which I had been using. You were one of those weird cross-over moments where two seemingly unrelated interests of mine happened to share a common link. When I first started watching you I believe you were just learning the guitar. I've watched as you learned and grew as a musician, then you toured I think with some Gypsy Jazz group. Heck, you just appeared on Josh Turner's channel doing a duo ... another surprising cross-over.

I just thought it might be nice for you to hear that someone is quietly watching what you are up to and that I draw inspiration from the things you produce.

Thanks for the nice comment! Made my day. :-)

Good, perhaps, in a pinch but I and all musos I know already have their favourite looping / slow-down / EQ / song segment apps. I use Anytune Pro on an iPad, myself, and for one thing it has fractional speed adjustment - 0.5 / 0.75 / 1 etc is just too broad a range, especially as I like practicing things at 0.7 then 0.8 then 0.9 etc if they are particular tricky to get down.

Also fun: paulstretch

I use it to take Gyuto monks chanting and turn it into cccccchhhhhaaaaaannnnnnttttttiiiiiinnnnnnggggg.

ok this is awesome. I've been doing this manually in reaper for years!

One thing though, the "slow down" algorithm you're using is really wack sounding. Have you looked at phase-vocoder based approaches, or overlap-save?

I think it's just youtube's playback algorithm

Yeah, unfortunately, YouTube's algorithm causes a lot of noise so I may try one of the approaches you mentioned down the road. Thanks for the pointers!

I have used mpv for something like this before. '[' and ']' changes playback speed and 'l' sets the loop-points. Using the --af=rubberband=pitch-scale=<value> command-line option is also helpful if the melody you want to transcribe is too low or too high for you to decipher easily.

Sure beats recording to a loop cassette tape and pitching down with vari-speed. From a convenience standpoint anyway

FWIW offline alternatives include Riff Studio for Android. I assume there are alternatives for that and iPhone.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.brazzi64.r...

I do this using AIMP2 (AIMP3 has a worse pitch shifter/tempo adjuster) along with the vocal remover (as most guitar parts you want to know are off to one side or another so they come through) for learning guitar parts.

Very cool! I installed a youtube looper in my browser that allows me to loop on selected time frames. But it's not very friendly so I will definitely check this out.

I used to listen to Scott Joplin records at a slower speed (back in the day, my record player had a switch that ran the record at different speeds). really liked it.

To learn something by ear is to simply remember the sound/song and then repeat it intuitively (as opposed to reading music or copying finger positions).

This works well, if you want to reproduce a song and get every single note right, been using mplayer myself so far which also works to slow down songs.

0.75x please

This. Also 0.95x and 0.90x. Even better, let user put whatever speed feels better. That way can also be used for improvement in foreign language accent reduction.

A recommendation would be isolating frequency ranges and also selecting mono/left/right to isolate a single guitar/instrument.

I developed a web app to slow down music arbitrarily, isolate tracks, set loops, and sync with video lessons a while back to solve my own needs when learning to play new songs on guitar. It’s now owned by Hal Leonard (I have no affiliation anymore), who have added a ton of amazing content. Here’s a preview (full songs are behind a paywall):

https://www.guitarinstructor.com/product/g-plus/dire-straits...

Ah, you’re the guy who made that? I make Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/), which is also about synced sheet music. Kudos from an industry peer.

Did you make it to sell it? I assumed it had always been a Hal Leonard product and didn’t realize they’d done an acquisition.

I’m a big fan of Soundslice!

More specifically, the G-Plus lesson interface of Guitar Instructor used to be Tunessence. It was a labor of love that we definitely did not build with the intention of selling. We wanted to teach people music through their favorite songs. Ultimately the licensing required to do that proved to be a hurdle we couldn’t clear, so we’re very grateful the product is able to live on in a great home. As the largest publisher of music, Hal Leonard was an obvious and great fit.

Damnit I have wanted to make exactly this, you beat me to it. Nice job. :)

Any DJ Screw fans out here ?

This is perfect for golf! Thanks!

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